#Microblog Mondays: An Unfamiliar Funeral

Saturday we went to a funeral, the first of its kind I'd been to.

It was the funeral of a former student, who died of an inoperable brain tumor at just 21.

That alone was heartrending. He was diagnosed last year, and tried so many things to fight the tumor, but it killed him in the end, before he'd had much chance to do so many of the things that make up a life.

The funeral was a Laotian Buddhist ceremony, which was another first. We've been to a Laotian wedding, same family (I taught this young man my first year teaching 8th grade, and when we were having the "what did you do over the summer" conversation, he described a family wedding and I realized that we were at the same one -- we're friends with his aunt), so we've seen and participated in a happy occasion, but this was very different.

I am (somewhat) used to Protestant funerals where there is a program, there is a finite order to things, and you know what to expect -- there is something beautiful though about being thrust into the middle of a culture where you are a complete outsider, where you just sit in the grief with the family and try to absorb as much as possible.

Much of the ceremony was not in English. There were three monks, who chanted and sang in harmony, and there was a row of male family members who were novice monks for the ceremony -- wearing the orange cloth and with shaved heads and eyebrows. The women in the family sat on the floor in front of the (open) casket, wearing all white, a white sash, and white ribbon in their hair -- they were the white nuns (I looked it up afterwards, it seemed in poor taste to ask the mourners what they were doing and why). There was a ceremony where a long white cloth rope was tied to the young man, and then the monks and the novice monks held the rope and there were a series of prayers that repeated and had a cadence. There were tributes of orange cloth laid in the casket. There was a gold bowl of white rose flowerheads with scent sticks to put into the casket before the cremation, as the closing part of the ceremony (we did not go to the crematorium and cemetery, that felt too personal, but then in my online research I found that that is considered part of the funeral itself, and so I felt bad about ducking out early).

It was beautiful, and incredibly sad, and I felt so honored to be a part of it, even though it was so massively unfair that everyone came together to mourn the death and celebrate the life of someone so, so young.

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